Tobias Lütke
Tobias Lütke is a German-Canadian entrepreneur who co-founded and serves as CEO of Shopify, a publicly traded e-commerce platform headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario. He founded the company in 2006 after initially building an online snowboard shop called Snowdevil using the Ruby on Rails framework. He is known for his early advocacy of AI integration in business operations, notably through a 2025 company memo requiring employees to justify why AI could not perform a task before requesting new hires. He also serves on the board of directors of Coinbase.
“The Academy is designed to become a profitable business... The $40M raise was deliberately sized for multi-year runway... Named angel investors in the $40M Academy round.”
Source→“people like Peter or you or Boris Cherny and like Toby from Shopify who have had whole careers like managing teams of engineers actually like take to this super well”
Source→“He said somebody was going to build the AI native version of Shopify. And he said, and it's going to be me.”
Source→“Lütke doesn't send OpenAI polite feedback. He writes software himself, tests models himself.”
Source→“Toby is a developer's developer. And so you know he's going to be understanding and pressurizing.”
Source→“I remember actually reading his memo to the company, the AI memo, and thinking, ah, it seems a little much. You're making a big deal out of something that I cannot yet feel is a tangible thing.”
Source→“Toby, Toby Lutka, the CEO of Shopify and now my partner in crime on this Omachi project in part, he's gotten pilled with Omachi as well. He saw these things very early and he tried to tell me.”
Source→AI-extracted from podcast / newsletter / paper summaries. May contain errors.